


Fox in the Hen House

by AngeNoir



Series: Inktober 2018 [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Anthropomorphic, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-25 00:22:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16186235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngeNoir/pseuds/AngeNoir
Summary: Pepper had always set her sights high, even if she was feeding into the unjust society her parents had eschewed.Luckily, she had someone who'd helped her achieve her dreams and enact real change.





	Fox in the Hen House

She had dressed her very best for this interview. She’d already been working as a lowly office worker for about a year and a half now - when the managerial position opened up of her office floor, she shot for it. Ambition, they often said of the vul-kin, was their downfall.

She was barely qualified, at least on paper - her experience in the workforce was short, her time at the company was short, and her education level, while exceptional, had been in a wholly different field than managing officer drones for the fastest growing technological giant in America. Stark Industries sold staggering amounts of product to the American military, manufactured and produced engines and guns and even a few models of commercial-level tech that made them look good before the cameras.

And she had known, from the beginning, that that was how it was going to be. That she was working for a soulless, immoral company. Her parents had been, well, not  _hippies_  but definitely not people grounded in the here and now. Her older sister had gotten as far away from the family as she could, like a bullet shot out of a gun, unable to put up with the values and morals and the like espoused and preached by their parents. She always envied her sister, her sister’s ability to simply cut family ties.

“Virginia?”

She stood up and walked into the conference room. It was... intimidating, to say the very least. She was only about three years out of college, and here she was, standing before a panel of five men, looking older than god.

She was terrified out of her wits.

She was also getting angrier as the interview went on, because it seemed like it wasn’t even her inexperience they were questioning - oh, they were wording it like that, very carefully, but the hints and the talk-arounds all seemed to circle whether she could “handle an office” because it would be such a “difficult task” and not for someone who “lacked strength” and maybe she was reading too much into it - maybe she wasn’t - she couldn’t tell -

Her ears, so carefully pinned back and held tight against her skull, pricked up at the sound of the doorknob behind her turning.

He whirled into the room, bright and flashy, orange fur and curved ears, glassy eyes and nimble, claw-tipped fingers tapping against surfaces. To a one, they were all shocked, and stopped dead in their tracks. It took the newcomer - no, she knew who this was, it took  _Stark_  a few minutes before he realized he was in the wrong room.

“Hey, you’re not the board, are you?” he said, and she could tell by his voice he was more than a little tipsy. “You’re missing big-nose what’s-his-name. The face. The nose. Guy. With the grey.”

They all stared at him, and she realized they had no idea how to handle this disaster of a human being who was, what, almost reaching his thirties and clearly unable to exhibit basic human decency? So she stood up and put out her hand. “Mr. Stark, my name is Virginia Potts.”

His glassy eyes, hidden behind shadows and surrounded by puffy bags, zeroed in on her. “That sounds like a fake name,” he drawled. “And I don’t shake hands, beautiful. Nice color of red on you. Love the tail.”

Before the entire interviewing board, the CEO of the company, and god above, she slapped Stark in the face.

She had about three seconds to panic before she turned on her heel and stalked out of the room.

* * *

 

“That’s how you met him?”

Pepper sipped at her tea, smiling into it. The memory that followed it was what had changed her mind, had made her realize that she still had a chance. Had made her reconsider. She looked at the short, golden coat and the beautifully manicured lioness’s claws, and set her cup down delicately. “That’s how I met him,” she told Natasha.

Because Tony, and his wild impulsiveness and flashy behavior, had seen her and her fur, had pulled up her records in the office, and then had personally come to apologize to her, offering her a position astronomically higher than where she had been aiming. It hadn’t been glamorous, being his legal secretary, and then his personal secretary, and then his PA, and then his CEO.

But she had always aimed high, and she was in the position now to change things.

And she had - the company was booming, growing, expanding ever more into new and different markets. It had stopped selling guns, started marketing clean energy. She had watched Tony mature, and grow, and change from the playboy she had known in his thirties to someone who no longer hid his heart, who wore it out in the open, protected only by the hard shell he made. She had reached the top of her mountain, and as she swished her tail and smiled secretively at Natasha, she knew - 

The rest of that story, his memory, they were hers, and hers alone.


End file.
